Christophe Ponsard, Jean-Christophe Deprez, Dimitri Durieux, Driving the Evolution of Cloud Software towards Energy Awareness, Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATTOSE), Mons, July 6-8, 2015.
ICT energy efficiency is a growing concern. Large effort has already been spent making hardware energy aware and improving hardware energy efficiency, and further progress in this area requires to consider evolving the software layer to more energy awareness. Although specific work is devoted in areas like embedded/mobile systems, much remains to be done at software level for Cloud applications. Software developers need an energy aware Cloud infrastructure as well as code development support to make informed decisions about energy efficiency and compromise with other important non-functional requirements like performance. This evolution to energy awareness impacts a number of artifacts including requirements, design, code and tests.
In the scope of this paper, we focus on the evolution of analysis phase (requirements, design and test load specification) with the limited goal of enabling the collection energy measurement data that can be used for a design time evolution and will later enable dynamically adaption scenarios. In order to help Cloud application developers, we propose a framework composed of (1) a Goal-Question-Metric analysis of energy goals, (2) a UML profile for relating energy requirements and associated KPI metrics to application design and deployment elements, and (3) an automated Cloud deployment of energy probes able to monitor those KPI and aggregate them back to questions and goals.